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Wednesday, November 09, 2011

A Serial Accuser? Second Cain Accuser Filed Complaint In Next Job After NRA

We found out a lot about Sharon Bialek yesterday, now it appears the formerly anonymous accuser, Karen Kraushaar, filed complaints in the jobs she held following the National Restaurant Association (AP - Yahoo News).

A woman who settled a sexual harassment complaint against GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain in 1999 complained three years later at her next job about unfair treatment, saying she should be allowed to work from home after a serious car accident and accusing a manager of circulating a sexually charged email, The Associated Press has learned.

Karen Kraushaar, 55, filed the complaint while working as a spokeswoman at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Justice Department in late 2002 or early 2003, with the assistance of her lawyer, Joel Bennett, who also handled her earlier sexual harassment complaint against Cain in 1999. Three former supervisors familiar with Kraushaar's complaint, which did not include a claim of sexual harassment, described it for the AP under condition of anonymity because the matter was handled internally by the agency and was not public.

To settle the complaint at the immigration service, Kraushaar initially demanded thousands of dollars in payment, a reinstatement of leave she used after the accident earlier in 2002, promotion on the federal pay scale and a one-year fellowship to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, according to a former supervisor familiar with the complaint. The promotion itself would have increased her annual salary between $12,000 and $16,000, according to salary tables in 2002 from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Kraushaar told the AP she considered her employment complaint "relatively minor" and she later dropped it.

"The concern was that there may have been discrimination on the job and that I was being treated unfairly," Kraushaar said.

...Details of the workplace complaint that Kraushaar made at the immigration service are relevant because they could offer insights into how she responded to conflicts at work. She now works as a spokeswoman in the office of the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration.

Kraushaar's complaint was based on supervisors denying her request to work full time from home after a serious car accident in 2002, three former supervisors said. Two of them said Kraushaar also was denied previous requests to work from home before the car accident.

The complaint also cited as objectionable an email that a manager had circulated comparing computers to women and men, a former supervisor said. The complaint claimed that the email, based on humor widely circulated on the Internet, was sexually explicit, according to the supervisor, who did not have a copy of the email. The joke circulated online lists reasons men and women were like computers, including that men were like computers because "in order to get their attention, you have to turn them on." Women were like computers because "even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval."

A couple of things here.

It appears, in my mind at least, that most likely Cain is right and he did not act inappropriately. It could have been something he said, like the height remark, that this lady took the wrong way. While sexual harassment in the workplace is a serious issue, there's also the issue of what constitutes it, and if some definitions can be vague. This is one of the areas I have a real problem with, and I think is a result of radical feminism. An inappropriate touch or photograph at a desk is one thing. An innocent compliment or even asking a co-worker for a date is another.

Joel Bennett, her attorney, appears like Gloria Allred to be another ambulance chasing attorney. What does she do, run to him everytime she doesn't like something at her workplace, he sees dollar bills, and then threatens her employer? In other words, a shakedown artist.